Robots after your job: the professions being automated

This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Some professions are safer from automated competition than others, but with bots expanding into new territories, no area is truly safe -- not even these...

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Education

We might not yet be at the stage of automated teachers, but we're not far off. Consider gamified learning tools -- such as

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Duolingo, Apple's iPhone App of the Year for 2013 -- which make memorising foreign translations as addictive as Flappy Bird. When it comes to spotting plagiarism in essays, algorithms are already used for sifting through coursework and pulling up passages copied from other sources. As natural-language processing becomes more intuitive, these tools will move beyond passage-comparison to look at detailed content and idea analysis.

Writing

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Although news-article-generating companies such as Narrative Science have been around for some time, the idea of actual books generated by algorithm still seems like sci-fi. But try telling that to entrepreneur Philip M Parker, whose company ICON Group International (himself and around seven programmers) has published 700,000 algorithmically generated books during its short history.

Covering everything from poetry to business-case studies, ICON is perfect for the era of the long tail. Generating each book takes just an hour and books are printed only when someone buys one --

Parker's work no longer needs appeal to mass audiences to turn a profit. His next project: novels.

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Military

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We all know about drones in war zones, but you may be unaware of the extent to which the military has embraced robotics. US Army general Robert Cone stated that, by 2030, robots could make up 25 per cent of US combat soldiers. Training, feeding and supplying human troops is expensive -- and then there's a lifetime of medical care after they finish. Last October, the US Army tested multiple remote-controlled gun-firing robots, while BigDog, a robotic pack mule owned by Google, receives research funding from the US government.

Medicine

Algorithms are helping democratise healthcare: making tracking our own well-being open to all. In January, Google unveiled plans for a new contact lens that will monitor the glucose levels in tears -- potentially transforming the lives of almost 400 million diabetics around the world, who currently have to draw their own blood to check insulin levels. Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a biosensor that predicts heart attacks by listening to the sound blood makes as it flows through arteries, and using this to detect irregularities. And that's without even mentioning the pattern-recognition algorithms able to detect diseases such as cancer.

Driving

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As pointed out elsewhere in this feature, algorithms driving cars were something deemed impossible a decade ago. Here's something else that might surprise you in 2014, however: having a human driver may end up proving more expensive than it's worth. Not only are human drivers more likely to crash than are their Google-engineered automated counterparts, but they also pose a far greater risk of causing traffic jams and other delays that will slow down your journey. Throw in the idea that insurance premiums could become unsustainable for human drivers in the not-too-distant future, and the idea of having a human behind the wheel may simply prove more trouble than it's worth.

Legal

It's possible to make an easy joke here and question just how big a leap it really is to replace lawyers with automatons. One company carrying out the kind of work that would have been possible only for a (human) lawyer in previous years is Wevorce: a Silicon Valley startup which offers a divorce service mediated by algorithm. Not only does Wevorce provide a system which identifies 18 different patterns in divorcing couples -- but it can even advise on what stage a person's former partner is likely to be at in the grieving process. And for far less than the cost of human counsel, too.

This article was first published in the May 2014 issue of WIRED magazine